Progressive Media

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The media landscape continues to be roiled by the dismissal of longtime newsman Scott Pelley from “60 Minutes” and from CBS News entirely. Pelley’s tenure at the network has ended, but the collective wailing in the news industry continues. By the sounds from many, we are witnessing the demise of journalism, the keel-hauling of free expression, and democracy itself has become rendered like a treehouse in a wildfire. (Those claiming this is the oligarchal Orbanization of our press have been especially insufferable.)

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“The city of Saint Paul has officially determined the January 18 invasion of our church and the desecration of our worship to be a ‘peaceful protest.'”

The lead pastor of Cities Church in St Paul, Minnesota, has criticized the city’s mayor after agitators who stormed the church in January, including former CNN reporter Don Lemon, have avoided state charges related to the incident.

In a statement on Wednesday, city attorney Irene Kao said, “Our office has a legal and ethical obligation to file charges only when the available evidence establishes probable cause and supports a reasonable likelihood of conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

She said that following a “careful evaluation of the video footage, investigative reports, and other available materials, prosecutors determined that the current evidence is insufficient to meet that standard for criminal charges under Minnesota state statutes.” She added, “The right to peacefully protest is protected, as is the right to exercise one’s religious beliefs. Balancing these equally important rights is paramount to our decision today.”

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Scott Pelley, one of the most well-known journalists on the CBS News roster, revealed that the pro-Trump management now leading the network has pressured him to inject bias and lies in news stories. On Tuesday night, Pelley was fired from CBS.

In a statement released via social media, Pelley said the current management of CBS is casting the “legend” of CBS News aside, “apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”

Pelley said management has “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” He added that he was “told to include assertions that are unverified.”

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… 60 Minutes lost its credibility years ago. Of course Bari Weiss wants to get it back, It’s her mandate.

Yesterday, Scott Pelley hijacked a meet and greet with new staffers and accused the new CBS News boss of ‘murdering’ ‘60 Minutes’

As one commenter pointed out, “If Pelley’s intention was to come across as though he was in charge and had no desire to adapt to the changes in management, then mission accomplished.

While I am sure his colleagues will display empathy or sympathy, I can’t picture any other job in any industry where a manager or member of the leadership team wouldn’t have fired him for gross insubordination.”

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Fired longtime CBS correspondent and host Scott Pelley — who believes he’s on par with American war heroes — sought to keep his aircraft-carrier-sized ego and farcical martyrdom alive Wednesday with a second statement about his firing over his ambush Monday of new 60 Minutes boss, Nick Bilton. This time, he said news reports about Wednesday morning’s editorial meeting in which editor-in-chief Bari Weiss addressed Pelley’s ouster was filled with “lies” and “antithetical to everything we stand for[.]”

Pelley even said Weiss’s description of events “reveal[ed] contempt for what journalists do.”

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Over the holiday weekend, New Jersey Democrat politicians gathered outside Newark’s Delaney Hall, which ICE has been using as a detention facility for over a decade. CNN showed video on Tuesday morning’s The Situation Room of several prominent Democrat politicians. Included in their highlight reel was New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, Senator Andy Kim, and Representative Robert Menendez, who spoke to cameras outside the facility amid swarms of protesters performing the modern Democrat’s favorite pastime as they clashed with officers and attempted to block vehicles coming in or out.

These particular protests were spurred by unsubstantiated “reports of rough conditions like rotten food and a hunger strike by detainees,” according to co-host Pamela Brown.

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The Center for Intellectual Freedom is a comically-named educational institution established by Iowa’s conservative legislature to counter the liberal indoctrination of traditional education. Few students have availed themselves of its “top-tier scholarship,” though, though, leaving commissars with a numbers problem. A solution is at hand: force University of Iowa students to take classes there if they want to graduate.

Republican lawmakers added a provision to a massive budget bill during a 35-hour legislative session requiring University of Iowa students to complete at least six credit hours from the center to earn an undergraduate degree. The bill now heads to Gov. Kim Reynolds’ desk.

The center opened in the spring semester, having been allocated $1m in funding with millions more to come, but enrollment is “dismal”. A report impressed upon its readers the need to require students to take the courses if they are to bother. The bill doesn’t become law until Gov. Kim Reynolds signs it; she may also veto it or use a line-item veto to strip the requirement.

The center launched two one-credit hour classes in late March. Numbers from the University’s website show one class has just 8 of 32 seats filled, and the other has 11 of 32 seats filled. Ben Murrey of the nonprofit research group Common Sense Institute, which the center hired to analyze demand and student interest, said he is not surprised by the low turnout. … “it’s remarkable that they got really any enrollment at all.”

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MEXICO CITY — The Trump administration has deported nearly 13,000 Cubans, Venezuelans and other nationals to Mexico, where they are vulnerable to cartel violence in an unfamiliar country, a report by Human Rights Watch released Wednesday said.

While Mexico has accepted these types of deportations for years, the deportees under the Trump administration are older and have lived in the U.S. for longer than in the past, making it more difficult for them to find work and increasing the urgency of the need for medical care.

The report, which is based on more than 50 interviews in the southern Mexican cities Tapachula and Villahermosa, comes as U.S. President Donald Trump has expanded immigration enforcement to carry out his mass deportation plan.

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A woman casts her ballot at a polling station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 3, 2024.Kamil KrzaczynskI/AFP/Getty

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The Voting Rights Act is widely considered one of the most effective laws in prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. One of its key provisions has long allowed states to take race into account when drawing voting maps to ensure that nonwhite voters have electoral power. But earlier this year, the Supreme Court narrowed that provision. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan described the court’s decision as the “now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

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Is Paramount making a Tony Soprano move?

David Ellison’s media company appears to be girding for a big battle with California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and fellow state attorneys general who may team up to file a lawsuit aiming to block Paramount’s proposed $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Last week, Paramount hired powerhouse antitrust attorney Jeffrey Kessler to help defend its proposed takeover of Warner, which owns CNN, TBS, HBO and the prestigious Burbank film and television studios.

Kessler — co-executive chairman of Winston & Strawn in New York — is one of the nation’s top antitrust lawyers. He most recently led the state attorneys’ case against concert promoter and ticketing firm Live Nation, resulting in a monumental win for the states, including California.

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A US journalist, Thomas Pauken II, faces charges for allegedly acting as an unregistered agent for China. Federal authorities claim he prepared confidential political reports for Chinese intelligence, intended for President Xi Jinping. Pauken, who lived in China for over a decade, denies espionage, stating he only performed professional work without proper paperwork….

A US-based journalist and political commentator who spent years working in China has been charged by federal authorities with allegedly acting as an unregistered agent for the Chinese government.

Thomas Pauken II, a commentator and author who lived in China for more than a decade, is accused of carrying out activities on behalf of Chinese government-linked contacts without properly registering with the US attorney general, according to federal court documents reported by Politico.

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In a sharp rebuttal to media speculation, the Trump administration has pushed back against claims that Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard was ousted from her position amid internal tensions.

The controversy erupted on May 22, following Gabbard’s announcement of her resignation, which she attributed entirely to a personal family crisis. Major outlets, including Reuters, highlighted both her stated reasons and anonymous sourcing suggesting deeper White House dissatisfaction.

The Reuters report detailed Gabbard’s resignation as Trump’s top intelligence official, noting her public explanation tied to her husband’s health. However, the article prominently featured an anonymous source familiar with the situation who asserted that “Gabbard had been forced out by the White House.”

The source claimed the administration had grown unhappy with Gabbard over several months, citing issues such as the activities of her Director’s Initiatives Group task force and perceived frictions on national security matters, including aspects of U.S. policy toward Iran.

Reuters noted that the White House initially did not respond to requests for comment on the forced-out narrative, fueling immediate online debate and criticism of media coverage.

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After the Southern Poverty Law Center gets the DOJ’s sham fraud indictment tossed out of court, they should sue every one of these liars for defamation. As we’ve already discussed here, Republicans hate them because they expose the white supremacists and neo-Nazis that make up so much of their base, so now they’re trying to destroy them by pretending they’re sponsoring hatred rather than going undercover to expose it.

Rep. Nancy Mace made an appearance on Fox’s Saturday in America with Kayleigh McEnany this weekend and was asked by guest host Jonathan Hunt what she thought of the accusations against the SPLC, and Mace spewed lots of lies and venom and demanded that the people running the organization be tossed in prison.

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The Israeli prime minister wrote on X: “I spoke last night with President Donald Trump about the memorandum of understanding to reopen the Straits of Hormuz and the upcoming negotiations toward a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.

“I expressed my deep appreciation to President Trump for his unwavering commitment to Israel’s security, including during Operation Roaring Lion and Epic Fury, when American and Israeli forces fought shoulder to shoulder against the Iranian threat.

“President Trump and I agreed that any final agreement with Iran must eliminate the nuclear danger. That means dismantling Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites and removing its enriched nuclear material from its territory.

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Earlier in 2026 a sub-Reddit called “r/liberalgunowners,” saw one user provide an update after describing a harrowing incident at home – but a New York Times columnist elected to leave out a large part of the story to deliver an anti-gun ownership spiel.

In the screenshot of the initial post on Reddit posted on X on March 2, according to BizPacReview, the user explained how his partner had purchased a Glock pistol “for self-defense as the federal government does fascist things in our community.” The Reddit user apparently provided additional updates later in the thread, based on another screenshot posted on X.

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Can you name one good thing the BLM movement has done for the Black community? No? I didn’t think so. You certainly can, however, name many bad things this movement and people involved in it have done that have been disastrous towards the Black community. This is why it is disingenuous for Sunny Hostin to imply this “uprising” has done anything beneficial for Black people.

According to Sunny Hostin, “there is no compassion between the Black Lives Matter movement and Jan. 6.” And in that regard, she is correct. There is no comparison. However, she justified this stance by claiming there was “very limited destruction of property and violence” during the “uprising of this movement.” This is incorrect because these riots caused the largest insurance claim in American history, while the amount of damage caused by Jan. 6 rioters was less than $3 million. While both numbers should be closer to $0, as Hostin said, it is comparing apples to oranges.

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The focus of Friday’s Washington Week in Review journalist roundtable (which aired on the eve of Memorial Day weekend) was the Department of Defense, especially on Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s war against wokeism, which the panel disapproved of, especially New York Times national security correspondent Helene Cooper, who all but accused Hegseth and the Trump Administration of racism and sexism.

Helene Cooper, National Security Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, that’s a great question, Jeff. I think I would start first with just he’s instilled an atmosphere of fear, which is pervasive now throughout the Pentagon, just because he has fired or threatened to fire or forced to retire just so many of the top brass….

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It’s extremely suboptimal that the only way the constitutional order is being preserved these days is by masses of plaintiffs filing lawsuit after lawsuit against the administration’s flagrantly illegal conduct. While the administration has fought nearly everything tooth and nail, a few settlements have slipped through.

President Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked diversity and wokeness, words that mean whatever Trump wants them to mean on any given day. But sometimes, woke wins, and the administration has no choice but to knuckle under, settle, and cut its losses.

These sorts of victories are few and far between these days, given that conservatives on the Supreme Court make a habit of giving Trump whatever he wants, giving him very little incentive to settle cases. But hey, we’ll take it.

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The Trump/Xi meetings in China were private. It appears that there were no big breakthroughs and “wins” for Trump to bring back to the United States.

Trump tried to flatter the Chinese leader, who responded with threats about Taiwan.

The Trump trip, where he took a bunch of the world’s richest CEOs with him, appears to have been a total bust on all fronts. Republicans were hoping that Trump would have another one of his fake deals with China to announce that would help to get farmers who are being devastated by the president’s toxic combo of war and tariffs off their backs, but there was no big announcement.

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Even if it wasn’t obvious before, it’s certainly been abundantly clear since the start of President Trump’s second term in office that Democrats have no qualms whatsoever about fanning the flames using outright lies and purposeful deception to the point it spurs their outrage mobs to take violent action in the name of  “democracy” and “social justice.”

 

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A protest sign outside Alabama’s statehouse on May 7.Kim Chandler/AP

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In a stunning act of political partisanship, the Roberts Court on Monday night discarded its own precedents to green-light a last-ditch effort by Alabama to use a gerrymandered congressional map for the 2026 midterms. The move, which comes less than two weeks after the court destroyed the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, will reduce Black representation.

Monday’s 6-3 order, divided along partisan lines, shows how Republican-controlled states can use the high court’s April 29 Callais decision as carte-blanche to shut Black representatives out of Congress. In Alabama’s case, precedent, court doctrine, and a damning lower-court ruling stood in the way of the state throwing out its current map containing two majority-Black congressional districts represented by Democrats. Monday night’s decision of the Republican-appointed justices to toss all that aside shows how the court has not only unleashed a new wave of racial and partisan gerrymandering, but is sweeping away any obstacles so that Republicans nab as many seats as possible this November—enough to potentially prevent Democrats from retaking the House.

“There’s something bizarre going on with the court making choices that seem to very heavily benefit one party.”

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A cluster of high-profile political attacks in the U.S. spotlight the nation’s extreme divisions—but they don’t necessarily signal a broader uptick in politically inspired brutality, experts say.

Politicians, pundits and ordinary Americans are increasingly worried about political violence. The latest round of concern was sparked on April 25, when a 31-year-old man stormed the Washington Hilton hotel in Washington, D.C., during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where President Donald Trump was in attendance. Secret Service agents arrested the armed man before he could get to the ballroom where the event was being held. He has since been charged with attempted assassination of the president—which would represent the third serious attempt on Trump’s life since 2024. The man has pled not guilty to this and related charges.

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Democrats must stop conceding that the only answer for various racist voting laws is that Democrats just have to vote more and harder and better.

We try to keep despair out of these pages, tough as the times are. That’s why I didn’t write about Friday’s Virginia Supreme Court’s decision striking down new voter-approved congressional maps for extremely dubious reasons (read Virginia political expert Carolyn Fiddler’s awesome explanation of the ruling here).

Coming after the Supreme Court (of the United States) decision invalidating Louisiana’s congressional maps for taking race into account, the Bayou State’s immediately postponing upcoming elections as a result, and Tennessee’s swift move to use the SCOTUS ruling to wipe a majority-Black congressional district literally off the political map, last week was the worst for voting rights since the court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder ruling struck down two vital sections of the Voting Rights Act. I admit to not seeing much light down this tunnel that afternoon.

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No one agrees on when, where, or how capitalism began, or whether it had a beginning at all, but everyone agrees that capitalism, the word, first appeared in the 19th century. Capital and capitalist slipped into use, unnoticed and unremarked, in the 13th and 17th centuries. Capitalism burst through the barricades of political argument in the 1830s, announcing immediately the hostility of its user. “Long live capital!” cried the French socialist Louis Blanc in 1839. “Long may we go on to attack capitalism, its mortal enemy, with even more intensity.” As much as the word named something, so did it identify its speaker—as a worker, a radical, a hater.

If capital was viewed as a thing and capitalists as people, capitalism was something else. Blanc described it as an act, the taking of collective wealth and turning it into individual or private profit. Proudhon claimed it was a citadel, casting medieval and military shadows across the land. Despite his obvious interest and extensive writing on the subject, Marx steered clear of the term.